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I have always been going to make an edge lit sign, but have not had time up to now.
I decided I would make one for my brother for his birthday, and picked out a picture of a Space Marine as my brother is into painting Warhammer models.
I used some 3mm Acrylic I had from another job, and used a nice chunk of oak for the base.
For power I actually used the power adapter for an old router as it matched nicely with the LEDs I used.
It wants a clean as some dust made its way under the protective cover during sanding, but I’m leaving that for the morning.
I just found a file and tried as both a v carve, and outline engraving 0.3mm with a 60deg v bit. I liked the engraving better so went with that.
I had some LEDs left from an old pc build so rigged them up to a 12v plug and then cut a pocket and a slot for the LEDs/acrylic. I cut a small slot for the cable, and stuck some blue felt on the bottom.
A lot of those LED signs have power cords. I only have abasic understanding of electronics, but wouldn’t it be possible to just use a 9V battery, 12 LEDs and some appropriate resistor to achieve the same cordless?
Just throwing it out there bc I am maybe going to try this someday soon.
Depending on how hot you run the LED color, you might get a solid day out of a 1000mhA lithium rechargeable. I run a little desktop sign for several hours (2-3hrs) at a time over multiple days before recharging. It uses an Adafruit rechargeable lithium pack and a DC to DC boost converter to get the 3.7 volts up to 5V which runs an Atmel ATtiny85 micro controller chip. That controls a rainbow flow of colors across 5 RGB LEDs. The Attiny85 chip does have a sleep mode that uses really small amounts of current. You could setup a motion sensor to turn on the LEDs when someone is actually in the room. Play with the timing of when the sensor takes a reading and you could run on battery for several weeks.
Video here: https://goo.gl/photos/4ttgcjyiUCfaHDvN7
That one is laser cut cast acrylic. I’ve got other acrylic stuff cut with the Xcarve, but they are not battery powered.
This is awesome! Great job I have trying to get a template to start with my own projects but haven’t been able to get one. Can you post yours on the inventables project page? Thanks
